And can I just say, my next book is gonna be about the empty nest period, so when I w- I think this is the best novel of the empty nest period, so it's, it's such a good portrait of that time.

Thank you.

When our son was 12 years old, my wife had an affair with a guy called Zach Zersky, whom she knew from synagogue.

He was a little younger, three or four years, had three boys, all younger than our two kids, but was in some sense in the same position as my wife.

They both had partners who made good money, which meant that they didn't have to do much and got bored and restless and maybe even depressed.

Zach's wife was head of oncology at Westchester County.

I saw Zach touch Amy's hand under the fold-out table at the Purim food bank drive, under the paper cloth.

[laughs]

do that

i'm getting into this conversation yeah so it's about a guy whose wife had an affair when the kids were small and he kind of tells himself at the time to help him get through a bad patch that when the youngest leaves home you can walk out and start again And the novel then begins when he drops his daughter at university, his younger child.

And instead of going home again afterwards, he keeps driving, as it happens across America.

Now, I did do such a road trip, but I actually did mine with my family.

And I knew I'd come up with this idea for a book.

And we didn't go all the way across America.

We started in Austin and drove to California, which is the same place that Tom ends up in the book.

Yeah.

Ben Markovitz was aware it wasn't a popular decision amongst the community.

I imagine there's quite a bit of justification for this feeling that they were empowered to run the school themselves and then rejected without giving much reason as to why.

Now Collegiate Academies are invited to apply by the same people who rejected them, and then given approval without much justification as to why.

This is, of course, deeply upsetting.

Yeah, rightly so.

One year earlier, Ben had talked with PBS about why Sci had decided to shift its discipline model.

We found ourselves sort of tragically stuck with nothing more than stuff like suspensions, stuff that got kids out of school.

We took a look at that this summer and said, "That's just not what we wanna do, it's not what we wanna be." So, what used to be a demerit is now a ton of praise in the opposite direction.